antifaust

Like a lot of Yahoo! Mail users, I was very disappointed when they decided to discontinue their free POP3 access feature. Now, in order to access your account with an email client, you have to sign up for their pay service. Microsoft-owned Hotmail, their strongest competitor, still allows free POP3 access, but the service’s spam-filtering and virus detection features are far less effective. I got my own POP3 email account several months ago, courtesy of my host, but most of my friends still send messages to my Yahoo! address. Until recently, I was stuck with the tedious process of having to use both an email client and a browser to check mail in two separate accounts. I was in desperate need for a simpler alternative — a way to access both accounts from one piece of software.

Two days ago, I chanced upon YahooPops!, an application which serves as a gateway between Yahoo! Mail and your email client. The app can act as a middleman because it’s part email server and part browser. The process of downloading and sending messages can take a long time on a 56k connection since the application has to connect to the Yahoo! Mail site before communicating with the email client. I can’t vouch for its effectiveness with other email programs, but — speed issues aside — it works very well with Outlook. I’m sure the developers are trying to fix the speed problem so I’ll be watching out for the subsequent releases.

If you have a Yahoo! Mail account, it’s definitely worth a try.

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